We’re excited to announce that our second competition—Dark Chess—is now available in preview mode. Please check it out and give us feedback, especially around the API.

Dark Chess is played with the same rules as traditional chess, except that you can only see your pieces and those that are in the movement path of your pieces. The goal is to capture the king, and there is no warning for check.

The SDK comes with a test client that you can use as human and/or AI, as well as some sample bots and an array of starter kits for some programming languages. Like Hold ‘Em, this competition requires a CLI-compliant assembly, so you can use any compliant language and tool to build your bot.

We’ll be working on some supporting material like videos and labs, so if you have any specific requests, please let us know in the Dark Chess forum.

Introductory AI course from Stanford is being offered to all online. Instructors are Sebastian Thrun, Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google Inc. Instructors will offer same course materials online, assignments, and exams and be available for online discussions and questions. Online enrollment ends Sept. 10th!!!

Tonight we added the ability to syndicate some updates to Twitter. To check it out, just head over to click the Manage link for your Hold ‘Em bot and look for the Syndication tab. We might move this in the future since this tab applies globally to all of your bots—not just for Hold ‘Em—but for now it seems fine.

The first network we support is Twitter and we’re working on Facebook next. If you’ve got requests beyond that, please let us know.

There are two wired up options for syndication right now:

Publish Tournament Results will publish the results of all tournaments your bots compete in. Right now there are 3 daily tournaments, so this will result in at least 3 tweets each day.

Publish Rank Increases publishes when your rank goes up. We track your highest rank in each competition, so you’ll only publish an update if you’ve achieved a new high. Once you reach #1—and it will happen—you won’t see any more of these for that particular competition.

We’re also going to add an achievement engine at some point, so you might as well sign up for that one too

We’ve been hard at work trying to deploy some cool new features, and I’m happy that we’ve been able to get them out today.

The first feature tracks your upload history. This gives you a chance to download earlier versions of your bots, along with a support file (if you provided one). The support file could be a source zip or anything else that you think might be useful when you need to get it in the future and was a great suggestion by detlefgrohs. Note that this feature was only enabled today, so it won’t have bots submitted prior to deployment.

The second feature—bot tagging—is only partly done since the UX is minimal, but it’ll be cool as our community grows. In a nutshell, you can tag your bot and then filter the leaderboard by the tags. For example, we’ll be tagging FinalBot employee bots with "finalbot", so you can see how all the employees rate against each other by adding "tagList=finalbot" to the query of a page with a leaderboard, like this one. We’ll be making the filter UX a little nicer in the near future so you don't need to muck around in the query string.

We’re excited to announce the FinalBot Hold ‘Em Summer 2011 Contest. You can win a $300 Apple gift card, and we’ll also have random drawings for 4 $50 Apple gift cards. All you need to do is submit a Hold ‘Em bot and you’re eligible.

We’d like to thank Corensic for stepping up to sponsor this contest, and we really hope you’ll check out their FinalBot sponsor page or head directly to their Web site. They make Jinx, which is a great tool for anyone developing apps that make use of parallel execution.

We've added a Big Pool series that will compete up to 23 bots at a time. Reviewing the logs for these matchups requires a slightly tweaked version of the test client, which can be downloaded as part of the latest SDK. Please note that the SDK name has not been changed since only the test clients have been updated. This update does not require any changes to bots since the reference assemblies have not been changed.